[TheClimate.Vote] October 18, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

Sun Oct 18 10:12:06 EDT 2020

/*October 18, 2020*/

[CBS Sunday Morning - text and video]
*For many climate change finally hits home*
- -
If you've been paying attention, none of this is news. What is new is 
that public opinion about the climate crisis is finally changing.

Pogue said, "When you see these headlines, like, '70% of Americans are 
now at least mildly curious,' it's not something to brag about. It still 
seems really low to me."

"To me, something like 70% or 75% of the country expressing concern 
about an issue seems really high," Wallace-Wells said. "We live an 
incredibly polarized world, where most of these issues, if you can nudge 
it past 50%, you're doing incredibly well."

So, what took us so long to become alarmed?

Wallace-Wells said, "Until quite recently, people didn't see the effects 
in their lives. I think almost no one now can look at their TV screens 
and think to themselves, 'Climate change isn't real.'"

The federal government has done virtually nothing about climate change 
in the last few years, but in many ways, the country has marched right 
ahead anyway - the mayors of 438 cities, the governors of 25 states, and 
700 universities have committed to cutting their emissions, mostly in 
line with the Paris Agreement, the 2016 international commitment to 
limit the Earth's heating up to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or less in the 
next 80 years.
So, what took us so long to become alarmed?
- -
Wallace-Wells said, "Until quite recently, people didn't see the effects 
in their lives. I think almost no one now can look at their TV screens 
and think to themselves, 'Climate change isn't real.'"

So, there is some good news: more people are talking about the climate 
crisis; more countries are doing something about it (even China); and 
last year, for the first time, the price of clean, renewable energy 
actually fell below the price of burning coal.

On the other hand, we're getting started far too late.

Pogue asked David Wallace-Wells if the latest developments give him any 
hope: "If you're hoping to preserve the planet of our grandparents, 
there's no reason for hope," he replied. "If you're hoping to preserve 
the climate as we know it today, there's really no reason for hope 
there, either. But I think that the worst-case scenarios are getting 
considerably less likely, because a lot of this action has taken place, 
a lot of the political momentum that we're seeing."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/for-many-climate-change-finally-hits-home/

[a few words on climate change - economists in general discussion - audio]
*RANA FOROOHAR AND MARK BLYTH - How Deep Will the Depression Get?*
Oct 8, 2020
theAnalysis-news
Rana Foroohar, Financial Times columnist and author (Don't Be Evil: How 
Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles), and Mark Blyth, political 
economist and author (Angrynomics), join Paul Jay for a wide-ranging 
conversation about the deepening depression, inequality, and China. On 
theAnalysis.news podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIiloLrnkBM

[clips from Foreign Affairs]
*Welcome to the Final Battle for the Climate*
The great powers have taken big steps to fight global warming. Now 
attention turns to the rest of the world.
BY ADAM TOOZE - OCTOBER 17, 2020
China's unilateral commitment to carbon neutrality by 2060 took the West 
by surprise. If President Xi Jinping's words can be taken at face value, 
the country which emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, 
Europe, and Japan put together is embarking on a radical program of 
decarbonization. Climate change politics at a global level thus shift 
into a new gear.

There were no doubt tactical motives behind the timing of Xi's 
announcement. But to imagine that China's strategy is a propagandistic 
diversion or a concession to Western diplomacy--a liberal quid pro quo 
for Xi's dictatorship--is both to overestimate Western leverage and to 
underestimate the climate problem. It is precisely because the Communist 
Party regime is bent on shaping the next century that its leader takes 
climate change seriously. In the calculus of the regime, Yangtze river 
floods are, like Hong Kong rights protestors, a threat to its grip on 
power. The future for Beijing's authoritarian China Dream looks far more 
uncertain in a world of runaway global warming...
- -
  A quarter century before it is expected to overtake the United States 
in terms of GDP, China surpassed it in terms of carbon emissions. China 
dominates all the heavily polluting industries worldwide--coal, steel, 
aluminum, cement. Once this could have been attributed to offshored 
Western production. Today, China consumes most of its heavy industrial 
output at home. With his decarbonization commitment, which eclipses any 
plausible future move that the EU or the United States might make, Xi 
has simply made clear where the real decision lies...
- -
As more and more countries enter the energy-intensive middle-income 
phase of growth, as they urbanize, build power stations, and their 
better off citizens buy cars and air conditioners, overall CO2 emissions 
surge. It is the environmental concomitant of the rise of the global 
middle class.
As a result, we are already well past the point at which global 
stabilization can be achieved by a deal between the G3. What both 
Western and Chinese climate policy need is a stabilization pact that 
involves not only India, but other big emerging market economies like 
Brazil and Indonesia, future population giants like Pakistan and Nigeria 
and the big coal, oil, and gas producers, like Australia, Canada, 
Russia, and the Gulf states. Those debates have been going on for years 
at global climate talks. But the announcement by China changes the game 
for all the players...
- -
Global emissions have continued to rise. The overall energy mix has 
hardly shifted. Economic growth wipes out any energy efficiency gains. 
Trump's withdrawal from Paris made an already disastrous situation 
worse, opening the door to backsliding by the Brazilians, Australians, 
Russians, and Saudis. It was this profoundly alarming situation that 
triggered the grassroots political mobilization for climate action that 
has been such a remarkable feature of the last few years. As the year 
started, the question was whether America's exit from Paris would be 
offset by new commitments from the EU and China.

Xi's announcement has gone further than anyone anticipated. In 2015, the 
refusal by China to commit to a definitive emissions path defined the 
Paris fudge. If the biggest piece of the future refused to be pinned 
down, there was no way to even define the equation to be solved. Now, 
Beijing has staked its claim. It has abandoned once and for all the line 
that separated emerging from advanced economies in previous climate 
talks. This will make it harder for Europe to renege and it will put 
significant pressure on India as well as the United States. But it also 
marks the terminus for the strategy of superpower bargaining that laid 
the groundwork for Paris. Now we have to finally come to terms with 
multipolarity...
- -
China has now doubled down on the Paris framework. For the first time 
since climate talks began in the early 1990s, the largest emitter has 
committed to decarbonization. But important as that is, it will not, by 
itself, be enough. What Beijing and anyone else who cares about climate 
stabilization needs now is not just a parallel commitment by the United 
States but binding commitments to deep decarbonization from the rest of 
the world. And for that, we will need a suitable tent...
- -
There are several hundred large and profitable corporations whose entire 
business model will be upended by rapid and deep decarbonization. 
Western oil majors like Exxon are high on that list. But of the ten 
companies that most dramatically increased their CO2 emissions over the 
last five years, four were Indian, two were Chinese, the others were 
Australian, Russian, and Korean. Swiss-based LafargeHolcim, cement 
supplier to the world, came in at number two. Energy is a business for 
state capitalists. Twelve of the top 20 corporate CO2 emitters are 
state-owned. The national oil corporations of Iran, Iraq, Mexico, 
Algeria, and Venezuela are not just businesses. They are pillars of 
their national economies and state finances.

One worry must be that recalcitrant coalitions will develop, whose 
projects for energy autonomy and economic development thwart the overall 
decarbonization push. Even within the EU, Poland, with its heavy 
reliance coal, has refused to join the otherwise unanimous commitment to 
net zero by 2050. In July this year, it used its bargaining power to 
puncture the carbon credentials of the European corona recovery pact. 
Repeated on a global scale, that is a worrying prospect. The 
increasingly frantic struggle for influence over the gas fields of the 
eastern Mediterranean is a case in point. Turkey has a rapidly growing 
demand for energy. It wants new sources of gas to relieve its alarming 
dependence on gas imports from Russia...
- -
And a narrow focus on prices and short-term profit margins may 
underestimate the forces that are at work. There are signs that, like 
the communist regime in Beijing, “big money” in the West is beginning to 
take a strategic view. In the week before Xi's speech to the UN, Climate 
Action 100 Plus, a lobby group whose members represent global investors 
with a collective $47 trillion in assets, announced that it would be 
judging 161 of the largest companies, collectively responsible for up to 
80 percent of global industrial greenhouse gases, by their progress 
towards net-zero carbon emissions.

Like Xi's speech there was no doubt an element of greenwashing in this 
statement. But it can also be read as a recognition by giant asset 
managers like BlackRock and Pimco that the stability of capital 
accumulation depends in the long run on maintaining a stable 
environmental envelope. For Western capital as for Xi's regimes, those 
risks are political as well as physical. In the event of future climate 
crises, firms that might be seen as recklessly endangering climate 
stability may be at risk of suddenly losing their license to operate. 
The experience of the airlines in 2020 has shown how suddenly the 
societal response to a future environmental crisis might jeopardize an 
entire industry...
- -
*It is tempting, therefore, to hope that with the climate commitments 
of* China and the EU, the world has achieved critical mass. 
Technological change, regulatory leadership, price incentives, and 
investor pressure will drive decarbonization. But to count on these 
forces alone is naïve.

The fossil fuel systems that define our lives are anchored not just in 
technology and profit. Decarbonization, like the construction of the 
fossil fuel economy in the first place, will involve questions of 
international power and geopolitics.
- -
Of course, the geopolitics of the exit from fossil fuels are not an 
American problem alone. For the last half century, Europe built its 
relationship with the Soviet Union and then with Russia on an energy 
import policy. (The Nordstream 2 pipeline is the offspring of that 
history.) Japan and now China are the major customers of the Gulf 
states. The leading OPEC states have considerable reserves and they 
vigorously assert their autonomy. In the Gulf, production costs are so 
low that states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar can confidently expect to be 
amongst the last suppliers of fossil fuels to the world. Fragile 
high-cost producers, the likes of Nigeria or Venezuela for instance, 
will feel the pinch first. But eventually, the balance of demand and 
supply will shift and, if minimum carbon pricing works, price wars will 
offer no escape. Between 2040 and 2060, the century of the oil-fueled 
global economy will come to an end.

This will be a revolutionary transformation, and the United States must 
carefully calibrate its intervention. There are of course plenty of 
reasons to welcome the disempowering of both Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
Visions of regime change will be tempting. But we should be clear about 
the risks. Simply to face the fossil-fuel producers with a fait 
accompli, with no way out, will incite resistance and encourage 
beleaguered incumbents to make dangerous gambles for salvation. Such a 
confrontational approach may appeal to those who want to see not so much 
a Green New Deal as a Green Revolution.

But if the timeline is as pressing as the science suggests, then the 
absolute priority is decarbonization. To that end we need to devise off 
ramps and ways of converting existing assets and wealth into claims on a 
new, low-carbon world. The most urgent priority is to generalize the 
interest in the project of climate stabilization. That, at least, is 
something the West now has in common with Beijing.
Adam Tooze is a history professor and director of the European Institute 
at Columbia University. His latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of 
Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working on a 
history of the climate crisis. Twitter: @adam_tooze
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/17/great-power-competition-climate-china-europe-japan/

["Stand Up - or stand aside!" a new podcast on activism]
*A Matter of Degrees*
Katharine Wilkinson, Leah Stokes
Give up your climate guilt. Sharpen your curiosity. This show is for the 
climate-curious people who know climate change is a problem, but are 
trying to figure out how to tackle it. We're telling stories about the 
levers of power that have created the problem -- and the tools we have 
to fix it.
Climate change is no longer a far-off scenario. It's happening now. It's 
getting more intense every year. And young people are seeing a scary 
future play out right in front of them.

In recent years, the youth climate movement has gained unprecedented 
strength. Borrowing from the civil rights movement and early 
environmental activists, young leaders are forcing politicians to 
grapple with climate change in new ways. Are we truly at a breakthrough 
moment? Or a breaking moment?

In this episode, we'll hear stories from Erin Bridges, Isha Clarke, 
Varshini Prakash, and Mary Anne Hitt.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-matter-of-degrees/id1534829787
- -
[Sunrise movement 2 years ago, 1 minute video]
*We Demand a Green New Deal*
Nov 18, 2018
Sunrise Movement
One week after the midterm elections, 200 young people joined Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez to demand Democrats back a Green New Deal. We have just 12 
years left to stop the climate crisis. We demand bold action now, and 
that means adopting a #GreenNewDeal platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khVNhXVZIu8

[History of the 97% - video]
*The Story of Climate Consensus*
Sep 2, 2020
John Cook
The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been a 
fierce topic for decades. To understand why, you need to know the 
history of consensus. The first message the public heard about the 
consensus on climate change was that there was no consensus. Next, 
scientists published a series of studies quantifying expert agreement on 
human-caused global warming - multiple studies found 90 to 100% 
agreement with multiple studies converging on 97% consensus. In 
response, climate deniers continued to argue there was no consensus (as 
well as argue scientists should stop talking about it because science 
isn't done by consensus).
Follow me here:
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/johnfocook
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/johnfocook/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/john.cook.186/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPNr9BeMNLk

[Pipeline Safety Trust - incident reports]
*A Decade in Review 2010 - 2019**
**Are we progressing toward the goal of zero incidents?*
http://pstrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Decade-In-Review.pdf

[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - October 18, 1983 *

In what would be one of her last "News Digest" broadcasts, NBC anchor 
Jessica Savitch mentions a recently released EPA report on the 
consequences of carbon pollution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w4pFNCzhTg
http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/#videoclip-3279
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/06/21/1101930/-A-Greenhouse-Effect-Warning-from-1983 

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